Sunday, September 16, 2012

Opening the Heart to Grieve

“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so
helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own
accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a
little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become
of it.”

—Arthur Golden, Memoirs
of a Geisha

Life involves us in grief, but it
is up to us how we will grieve. We choose our path. And varying levels and
depths of acceptance and rejection we align to. Sometimes we wholeheartedly
grieve. Other times we run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. Grief,
we can say, takes courage; it takes time; it takes great patience. And it
requires openness.

But grief is never more normal to
life, because we are constantly losing and gaining and losing again. We grow
attached and then things are ripped from our grasp. How are we to otherwise
contend?

If we care, life will hurt. If we
commit to love we will be forced to grieve.

The Necessity of Grief and Reinvention
of the Identity

It does us no good at all to close
our hearts to our grief. We save ourselves no ordeal; indeed we create an
unnecessary ordeal by closing ourselves off to what is our truth.

Opening our hearts to grieve means
we enter a journey toward the transformation from dead versions of ourselves
toward more relevant editions that we are becoming. Not many of us welcome that
idea; that we are called upon to reinvent ourselves.

But that is life. This
inconsistent and unpredictable existence requires us to adapt.

If we don’t adapt we don’t
overcome. And if we don’t overcome we really shrivel and die. When we tackle
our grief, notwithstanding how ambiguous or complicated it may be, we develop
resilience through acceptance.

Reconfiguring the identity never seems
a pleasant task, but the way life forces itself upon us we often appear to have
no choice. Yet we hardly perceive the limitless options to improve our lot by
the exploration of new identity.

Becoming More by Becoming Something Else

The concept of transformation
requires openness of mind and heart. When we can let go of what grieves us,
even fleetingly, we can begin to imagine new life. A new version of ourselves
is envisioned. It is strange and liberating that we can do this.

God gives us power and mastery
over our destinies of identity. We are the ones that rewrite the scripts. We
gain our own permission. We please ourselves. And God is pleased at our
volition to accept the offer of new life.

This new life is no negation or
betrayal of the old life or of those gone. All the more it is a testimony to the old life and to those gone that we may
live again.

***

Our grief is not the end of our
lives; it’s the beginning. Beyond our depressions and times of anxiousness for
the changes coming we have hope for new possibilities and a broader life than
we’ve previously had. Life after grief can, in fact, expand.

When we open our hearts to grieve,
we welcome the divine transformation of who we are becoming in the midst of our
new reality. The more we open our arms, the better it will be.